The intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) who reviewed the anonymous whistleblower complaint that triggered the House Democrat-led impeachment
effort previously served under then-Acting Assistant Attorney General
Mary McCord, who herself worked as the top outside counsel supporting
the impeachment effort.

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) highlighted the connection in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Jan. 11.

“This
ICIG actually has connections—was a lawyer for—some of the very people
that were involved in the FISA abuse scam,” Nunes told Bartiromo,
referring to the recently confirmed FBI and Justice Department failures
in applications to spy on a former Trump-campaign associate under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Prior to his confirmation as the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), Atkinson served as the senior counsel to McCord, who was then the assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice, according to a questionnaire (pdf) Atkinson submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

McCord
left her post in May 2017 and now serves as the legal director at the
Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and a visiting law
professor at Georgetown University. In addition to these positions, she
has been listed as the top outside attorney for House Democrats in key
legal fights tied to impeachment, according to Politico.

Her
transition from working in the Trump administration to pushing to upend
it comes as no surprise given her public statements. McCord told a
panel at the Brookings Institution in 2018 that she left the
administration because she felt she could not “actively undermine” Trump administration policies. She added that “others have chosen a different course.”

McCord did not respond to a request for comment.

Shortly
after the whistleblower’s complaint became public, McCord publicly
endorsed the substance of the document based solely on her high regard
for Atkinson.

“As soon as I saw that he had recommended it be sent to Congress, that’s all I needed to know it was legit,” McCord told CNN.

Although
there is no public evidence that McCord interacted with Atkinson
regarding the whistleblower complaint, the link between the two is
significant because the whistleblower contacted the office of House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) prior to
submitting a formal complaint to Atkinson.

Although contact between a whistleblower and the committee is routine, the impeachment whistleblower failed to disclose
his or her prior contact with Schiff’s office on the complaint form.
Schiff himself went on to mislead the public by stating that his office
has not been in contact with the whistleblower before later admitting
the opposite to be true.

Nunes made the comment about Atkinson’s
connections shortly after criticizing the ICIG for not providing
sufficient answers and documents to House Intelligence Committee
Republicans who are investigating the origins of the whistleblower
complaint. Central to the inquiry is the change Atkinson made to the
whistleblower complaint form which removed a requirement that
complainants submit only first-hand information.

Atkinson
made the change after the whistleblower submitted the complaint using
the old form, which expressly prohibited the use of second-hand
information. The impeachment whistleblower’s complaint consisted almost
entirely of second-hand claims.

Nunes sent a letter (pdf)
to Atkinson on Jan. 11, requesting answers to a battery of questions
related to the complaint form and other issues related to the anonymous
whistleblower. The request is a follow-up to one Republicans submitted
in September last year.

In the interview with Bartiromo on
Saturday, Nunes noted that House Intelligence Committee Democrats have
yet to release the transcript of Atkinson’s interview, making it the
only transcript from the impeachment hearings to not be released to the
public.

“Everything about the genesis of the whistleblower
complaint was abnormal—from the whistleblower’s secret coordination with
Schiff’s staff to the ICIG’s handling of the complaint—and we’re trying
to get to the bottom of it,” Jack Langer, the spokesman for Nunes, told
The Epoch Times.